You base-ten people amuse me with your superstitious belief in the special power of numbers ending in "000". Had it not been for that big hunk of space rock that hit the earth some millions of years back, thus changing the course of evolution and allowing mammalia, not dinosauria, to become the planet's dominant animal class, the most highly evolved animals would be the descendents of dinosaurs, not shrews, and they'd have four digits on each appendage, not five, which means they would use a base-eight counting system, not the decimal system we use. In base-eight, your precious '28000' is '66540'. Not so special any more, is it?

The most highly evolved dinosaurs at the time of the great extinction were probably about as intelligent as our deer. Not exactly dripping with smarts, but a helluva lot smarter than the lowly underbrush-dwelling mammals from which we evolved. They were much farther from being lizards than we are from being hedgehogs.

I see I missed that footrace to the next milestone, but I'm glad Janie beat the boys to it! I didn't have snow as an excuse, I was working on stuff today. Funny how that works, when you have a job. . .

A ridiculous notion on the face of it, sir, as there were never more than twenty-words of Mamulique ever collected. I am sure you are prevaricating about the prospective consequences of translation. There are no living speakers of the tongue, anyway. This is a pathetic red-herring, glimmering and stinking in the moonlilght like a lonely stoplight looming through the wet mists of time.

Another of your large collection of cockamamie "knowns" which are free of any observable connection to the actual. BEsides, how can you save face in an ASCII-based forum? What type of face do you have?

Hey Mom! 'Splain somethin' to me! When you remove the skin or rind from a vegetable before cooking, it's called "paring", right? And after that skin has been removed, the vegetable has been "pared", right? Now, the prefix "pre" means "before", right? So a vegeatble with its skin still on could be said to be in a "prepared state", right? But a vegetable that has been cooked is also said to be "prepared". So first it's prepared, then it's pared, then it's prepared. Huh?

it's a paradox anyway, because if before paring the item is prepared; but prepared would normally mean it was pared prior to purchase, in whihc case it would not need paring, because the prepared item was already pared.

There are two different paths to a single root (and one skin). The Latin root preparare, to get ready for something beforehand, is the same root as the one from which we get paring, I think, and it originally meant to reduce something little by little (since about 1500). It comes from an old root implying the birth of a calf or small animal. Parare, Lat. means to get ready, while preparare means to get ready beforehand. When you pare a vegetable you are making it ready, but you are also preparing it if you do it before you need to use it. If a vegetable is moving along a rail track at the speed of light c, and is observed by a chef C standing on the nearby platform X, then it will appear to the observer C to never quite arrive at readiness. It's all relative to temporal distortion.

A little old lady was walking down the street dragging two large plastic garbage bags behind her. One of the bags rips, and every once in a while a $20 bill falls out onto the sidewalk.

Noticing this, a policeman stops her, and says, "Ma'am, there are $20 bills falling out of your bag."

"Oh, really? Darn!" said the little old lady. "I'd better go back, and see if I can find them. Thanks for telling me."

"Well, now, not so fast," says the cop. "How did you get all that money? "You didn't steal it, did you?"

"Oh, no", said the little old lady. "You see, my back yard is right next to the football stadium parking lot. On game days, a lot of fans come and pee through the fence into my flower garden. So, I stand behind the fence with my hedge clippers. Each time some guy sticks his thing through the fence, I say, '$20 or off it comes'.

"Well, that seems only fair" laughs the cop. "OK. Good luck! Oh, by the way, what's in the other bag?"

Yes, he is. After he eats, showers, gets dressed, and things like that. Then tomorrow he's going to take an east-bound Aer Lingus flight to Shannon, assuming he doesn't get the Petty Hitler at the checkin counter he got last year. If he does he's going to be more than a little POed and will make the PH's day for him.

Alas, Rapaire, poor Rapaire. Oi knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.

He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, a whore's oath, a fencer's position, or a librarian's certainty..." said Lear.

And we all know that without purely spiritual powers, there is no certainty on the momentum and position of any particle, including Rapaire's, at any single moment.

Therefore, as you dream of Rapaire performing Aerolingus on his way to Shannon, remember he may perfectly well be riding bareback on the steppes of eastern Siberia. Ya never know which way the cat is gonna jump.

Hey, Mom! How come Amos always calls Rapaire "Good Rapaire"? I just got through talkin' with Wanda, one of the floozies that works at Velma's, the "dance hall" across the street* from The Legion Hall, and she says the boy ain't much good at all. She says if it's true that you are what you eat, Rapaire must eat nothin' but Minute Rice.

* Calling the thing between The Legion Hall and Velma's a "street" is being extremely kind. "Mosquito infested quagmire composed of equal parts mud, horse manure, and cow manure with the occasional dash of Legionaire puke tossed in for variety" is a more accurate description. But since it's hard to fit all that into the address line on an envelope, they call it a street.

There are many forms of goodness in the world, BeeDub, as you well know. SOme folks, the shape-shifters of virtue, transmigrate from one kind of goodness to another; if they're not good at stealing cookies undetected, they're being good at eating them, enjoying them, digesting them, or contributing them back to the environment.

Besides, I only use that phrase when I think I might have gone too far in annoying Rapaire, and am trying to make him hold still for the next black banderilla in my own little tercio de varas.

Hi, Mom! Did you know that if you are on land and you're not in some extreme environment like the South Pole or an artificially sanitized environment like an operating room, you're never more than four feet away from a spider?

Hi ya'll. My name is Lilly June and I work at Velma's Dance Hall across from The Idaho Legion's Legion Hall. Ya'll don't pay no attention to what my so-called coworker, Wanda, said about Mr. Rapaire earlier. Rapaire ain't no worse than any of the rest of that Legion Hall bunch. They is all a little quick on the draw, if you know what I mean. At least he takes his boots off first.

I don't know what got into Wanda. After all, we is floozies, not debutantes! You don't work in no dance hall if you're lookin' for true love. It's line 'em up, take their money, make 'em holler, show 'em the door.

A hard-bitten case indeed. No Normal Floozie would pen such lines; they all have hearts of gold, as big as the Panhandle, and are highly tuned to the faint traces of real color in quartz and real love in gennulmen.

Hey, Mom! About five miles north of where we live is a sign that says "Caution, Deaf Child". It's been there since we bought this property sixteen years ago, possibly longer. Shouldn't it say "Caution, Deaf Adult" by now?

Bee-dubya-ell, Harriette had a hissyfit when I called her Harold this afternoon.

Tried to bite me, she did.

Now she's a mere smear on the linoleum.

Hey MOM, I fooled around for two years and now have to scramble to get enough CEU's in to renew my license come July 1. So I'm headed down to Fayetteville very early in the morning to get some new ideas for treating OCD. Want I should wave at Ft. Bragg for you?